It’s inevitable that any review of an Emily Brontë biography arriving on the heels of Emerald Fennell’s bonkers adaptation of Wuthering Heights will reference the film (and most have). But I’m in the odd position of having also reviewed Fennell’s movie. This prompted an editor at W.W. Norton & Co. to send me an advance copy of Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, A Life, which was published in early May 2026. It arrived with a letter suggesting I might enjoy it after my “thrashing” of Wuthering Heights: “It’s not quite roaming the moors, but it’s close.”A lifelong Brontë reader, I received the book eagerly, but did not take its editor’s words literally. Having read it, I realize she meant them that way. There are biographers desperate to know a life from the outside in and the inside out, and there are biographers aware that their subject is fundamentally unknowable. Lutz is the latter, and she works instead to produce a social and domestic history of those closest to Emily, a natural history of the West Yorkshire moors Brontë immortalized in Wuthering Heights, and a material history of Emily’s writing practice which, in the hands of Lutz’s meditative attention, approaches the mystical. “Expertise,” dry and academic, is the wrong word to characterize Lutz’s understanding of the Brontës. Victorianists tend to work exclusively with the established texts of their subjects, but Lutz spent several years immersed in Emily Brontë’s hand-written manuscripts (detailed photographs of these are included in the book) and inhabiting Brontë’s hometown of Haworth, West Yorkshire, and Brussels, where she studied alongside her older sister Charlotte at the Pensionnat Héger. Lutz pored over the local weather reports of Emily’s lifetime and learned the flora and fauna of the moors so integral to Brontë’s life and work (Emily could identify local birds by their song and kept a collection of their feathers she found on her daily walks). In This Dark Night, Lutz’s deep knowledge of Emily Brontë transcends biography and—appropriate for her subject, who wrote one of the most famous ghost stories in Western literature—approaches a haunting.Written after a large cache of papers by the Brontës “that had been missing for over a hundred years” surfaced in 2018, This Dark Night gives readers a great deal of fresh information about Emily Brontë. Even with this new material, Emily remains the most elusive of the four Brontë siblings who survived into adulthood (the two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in childhood, events Lutz ties convincingly to Emily’s psyche and writing). Although Charlotte Brontë outlived Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she died at thirty-nine of complications from her first pregnancy, and Lutz posits that it was her widower who likely burned most of Emily’s correspondence and diaries.Absent these sources, Lutz employs the candid letters, diaries, and various historiographical accounts of Emily’s father, Patrick, and her siblings to methodically illuminate Emily’s whereabouts and behaviors; these provide a comprehensive and intimate view into Emily’s place in the family pecking order. [...]This Dark Night effectively refutes the lasting image of the Brontës as isolated sad girls, stuck in the sticks with their abusive reverend father, which originated with Elizabeth Gaskell’s now-classic hagiography of her close friend, Charlotte Brontë. Lutz sketches a bustling, industrial Haworth where the Brontë siblings, as the children of the town cleric, were frequently at the center of social life, and Patrick bears no resemblance to the stereotypically restrictive Victorian father of legend. He gave his five daughters the same radical education he gave his only son, tutoring them in foreign languages and allowing unfettered access to the literature of the day (including the scandalous Lord Byron). He aided their travel to London and Brussels, and encouraged their creative writing, refusing to pressure them to marry. Online lit discourse likes to bat at the possibility that Emily Brontë was queer. Lutz won’t go so far as to guess, but she shows us a West Yorkshire where the Brontë siblings knew Anne Lister, the celebrated English diarist and lesbian, whose rarefied education and androgynous appearance modeled a different kind of life for Emily Brontë than the available standard for middle-class Victorian women–one Emily, who never married and devoted her life to art and her sisters, seems to have lived.Emily’s living is at the heart of This Dark Night, which eschews the historically romantic notion of Brontë’s artistic genius that places Wuthering Heights as her singular accomplishment, with life a mere cipher for the novel. [...]This Dark Night is, therefore, literally a biography of the dirt beneath Emily’s feet which subverts the tired trope of Emily Brontë hitching up her skirts and running wild on the moors to instead give us a woman who was both a writer and a naturalist who also ran a household. Wuthering Heights is a book best remembered for the wilderness of its moors which nonetheless takes place almost entirely inside. We think of Cathy’s longing for that wilderness when she is trapped in confinement and the longing, the state of it, feels almost like the place itself. Lutz compels us to wonder if Emily Brontë felt that same longing—not for the moors, which were her literal backyard, but to break free of her human form, to seep into the “rocks and stones and trees” of the world she loved. It’s difficult to say for sure, especially since This Dark Night is so grounded in the physical—gardens, laundry, mending, cooking, dogs, cats, hawks. Yet Lutz captures Brontë’s ineffable desire to break free of her physical body, which is both a graver and braver thing than she might have done with this biography.It’s possible—valuable, even—to reduce a figure like Emily Brontë to the questions that trouble our own gender politics. Emily Brontë might have often wished to be a man, or to love a woman, and these things may have limited her ability to lead the kind of life some of her contemporaries led. To write a book that addresses how Emily Brontë was limited by her gender is one thing. Lutz shows us instead that Emily Brontë’s real limitation was her human form, and how she paradoxically used that form to harness a mysticism and create some of the language’s most lasting works, works which nonetheless elucidate our own gender relations in ways rarely surpassed, even today. That is what a genius does, I suppose.Near the close of the book, Lutz writes that, after Emily’s death, she became the “genius loci” for the remaining family members (only her father, Anne, and Charlotte remained, Branwell having died six months prior). She seemed to me the genius loci of This Dark Night, as well, if it’s possible for a subject to haunt its own book. Because the book is largely constructed of the words of those closest to Emily about Emily, rather than Emily’s own words, we see her in the periphery, or view her from afar. I felt pleasantly haunted throughout my reading of this biography, and was surprised to find myself weeping as it closed. I am a writer, and frequent reader, of biography. The death of the subject is pretty much the one thing you can count on in the genre, but Lutz paces her book so well that Emily’s sudden death seems to happen as quickly on the page as it did in life. The shock of it—Emily refused medical attention and insisted on keeping her eyes open to “meet” her end—took my breath away.I learned more about Emily Brontë and her famous siblings from reading This Dark Night than I knew before. These facts stay with me and yet, the more I learned, the more distant Emily grew. It was as though the attempt to contain her or reduce her to acts or incidents or objects was to break up this person, who was always so evidently more than the sum of her parts, into her parts, and then watch the parts erase the whole. This is no fault of Lutz’s and is part of her book’s great success, since this seems to convey how her contemporaries felt about her. Emily Brontë is long dead. She can never be brought back to life, but we are haunted eternally by her, by the dictum she gave herself.“There is no Emily in Time or on Earth now,” Charlotte is quoted as saying upon her sister’s death, and we feel that loss as keenly today as Charlotte did then—or fool ourselves that we do, or Lutz fools us that we do. If Emily can die like any other, we all can. We all will. This should have left me bereft, or at least a little grim, but instead I was comforted, and reminded of the feeling I have whenever I visit the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, specifically, and the Calder Valley more broadly, which I try to do every few years. It took me a long time to characterize this feeling, which is a meditative ecstasy that leaves me with a profound sense of well-being. Eventually, I just said it aloud, so here I go: When I am there, in the land that birthed and received Emily Brontë, I feel immortal. Not because of some delusion that I will never die, but because, paradoxically, I am aware that I absolutely will. And life will go on beautifully beyond me. If I am lucky, any small thing I’ve done or said will reach out to the living; maybe they will have a conversation with the dead, like this one, like Lutz’s. Maybe I will talk back. (Emily Van Duyne)
A new music video for "Sirens," from John Caird and Paul Gordon's Jane Eyre A Musical, celebrates the new Jane Eyre EP, Highlights From The UK Premiere Cast. [...]The new EP, from Westway Music, precedes the upcoming production of Jane Eyre A Musical at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant. Performances are scheduled to begin August 28 for a limited run through October 24.With music and lyrics by Gordon and additional lyrics by Caird, the EP also features the songs "Sweet Liberty" and "Secret Soul," both of which were performed by Burn and Gilmour earlier this summer at West End Live. The three-song EP is available to stream/download here.The recording has vocal and incidental music arrangements by Brad Haak and Steve Tyler, orchestrations by Larry Hochman and Haak, sound engineering by Ben Robbins, and mixing by Gordon. It is produced by Adam Blanshay Productions, David and Hannah Mirvish and Westway Music and published by Universal Music and ASCAP.In addition to Burn and Gilmour, the Southwark production will also feature Claire Greenway as Abbot/Grace Poole, Melad Hamidi as St. John/Lord Ingram, Connor Wood as John Reed/Vicar, Jonathan Andrew Hume as Brocklehurst/Mason, Izzi Levine as Agnes/Leah/Jane's Mother/Mary Ingram, Hannah Lindsey as Scatcherd/Bertha Mason, Isabelle Methven as Helen Burns/Bessie, Gemma Page as Reed/Fairfax, and Eve Shanu-Wilson as Blanche/Sophie with Poppy Jason as Young Jane/Adele and Emily-Rose Samuel as Young Jane/Adele.Caird and Broadway's Megan McGinnis will co-direct the musical, with choreography by Georgina Lamb, set and costume design by Morgan Large, sound design by Andrew Johnson, lighting design by James Whiteside, musical direction and supervision by Ben Kubiak, and casting by Sarah-Jane Price.The 2000 Broadway production of Jane Eyre was nominated for five 2001 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. (Andrew Gans)
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